Audrey Johnson. Photo by Houssam Mchaimech from “towards.”
6 improvisation scores (or, archives of making a solo through improvisational process)
by Audrey Johnson
1.
I walk into the studio.
(I have been here before.)
Mirrors confirm my here-ness: cue a two hour duet with myself. (rehearsal)
2.
You may take this as a score.
score: a sequence to attempt, words to embody, curious directives to consume in the flesh.
Of this dance I am making, months later, my marker on paper proclaims:
ARCHAIC
POETIC
SPIRAL
JOYOUS/KNOWING/REMEMBERING BODY
The list is the body-states I sequence through in the dance that I am making. The body is my own. I had been thinking a lot about what movement can do to “change how I feel.” But now I think maybe it’s about the courage to feel more.
I start with excavating inward. The underland of myself. I had been thinking a lot about rocks and rock formations and how they hold time. But really, it’s the impression that time passed that rocks hold; the grains of silt gathered, the direction of subduction or convection, the evidence of flora and depression of life. What is the evidence of tectonic processes in the body? The way time is impressed on my flesh? This is something to improvise about.
This dance is also about rocks and time.
The score writes the choreography.
3.
I am making a solo. And I am writing around, within, and now about it. The making, that is. It feels like a poem.
4.
I am back on the idea of more than just this body. I sit up to listen. I get up and dance to listen. Or to feel “surprise.”
Who is also in this mirrored duet? A question that asks: might this dance invite those who moved towards my body here, (the ones we call ancestors), to inform my rhythm-making now? Could a gesture repeated close the gap between me and my history? Dancing confirms - proximity can move.
Yet, a sound that speaks to my marrow is as familiar as pleasure. Again, history is a place I learned to remember. I drop away the thing that holds the mind over the body. I am beside myself, dancing with you. Telling your stories, shaking my ass, counting on the downbeat. Into and back, here I am in the repetition again. It’s delicious. And this is only what comes up from simply saying to myself: “spiral.” Come on in, won’t you?
5.
Recall a phrase you haven’t made up yet. I perform the in(ter)vention of the step, the accumulation of step into phrase, interrupt the fallacy that I have perfected this section before I stand before you and move. Surely I can’t expect myself to remember what I did that one day when I came in to my rehearsal feeling something wild and danced for one hour straight to some beat oscillating my body “moving the emotion like a memory” a bit crazy-making and ecstatic or something else. Like a memory, this section is about moving to remember something I did not already know I knew. My body knows a lot. It all started with the question: “How do I remember myself?”
6.
And what is the physicality of memory?
In this improvisation, I dance to know.
And what is the physicality of joy?
In this improvisation, I dance to know.
And what do I want, now and next?
In this improvisation, I dance to know.
And what does my liberation feel like right now, not an imagined next time or a “one day when we are all free,” but what in me is already free, to be felt and moved and lushly opened, liberation in this body, in time right now?
In this improvisation, I dance to know.
Audrey Johnson. Photo by Houssam Mchaimech from “towards.”
Audrey Johnson is a movement artist, teacher, and writer based in Berkeley, CA with roots from Detroit, MI. www.audreyjohnson.space
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